This is not by me, it's by an anonymous contestant, since there's an odd number of contestants in this round if it gets more votes than the average contest entry for this round by the time I count votes then it'll go to the next round.

The theme for this round is to describe the significance of something that's missing from an RPG text.Here is the first essay, if you like it best, send an email to zakzsmith AT hawtmayle with the subject line "EVE" and nothing else.

Making Your Character A Character

You’ve just bought a new RPG for your group to try out, and if it’s organized like most RPG rulebooks there’s a players’ section and a GM’s section. If the game is at all well-designed, the GM’s section has tons of useful information to help you figure out what you’re supposed to do both before and during the game. There will be rules you need to know, tips on using the built-in conflicts of the game world as hooks for adventures and campaigns, formulas for coming up with the right level of challenge, ideas to help you set the tone and mood during the game (horror games in particular like to talk about music and lighting), tricks for making action resolution easier, advice on creating memorable NPCs, and lots of other stuff. In the players section, you’ll find--well--setting background and basic game mechanics.

Ok, some games go a little farther than that. Sometimes the players’ section also gives you a few paragraphs about creating a character backstory or coming up with character goals and story hooks, but it firmly falls into the preparatory “character creation” step of role-playing. If the rules tell you anything at all about how to play your character once the game begins, it’s all very generic surface-level characterization stuff, like “use an accent” or “give the character a distinctive mannerism or nervous tick” or “masturbate vigorously when your character triumphs.” Most game books tell you how to create a character sketch, but offer very little information about how to tell a story with that character. They help you create an action figure, but don’t tell you how to play with it. If you’re mostly interested in the strategy game aspect of role-playing (hacking monsters, solving puzzles, that kind of thing), that’s probably all you need. If you want to focus more on storytelling, it might not cut it.

You might be inclined to think that game books don’t talk about how to tell your character’s story because people can figure that out on their own. After all, it’s not like you have to give a kid instructions on how to use an action figure. The problem is that an RPG is not the same as playing childhood imagination games, no matter how many cookie-cutter “What Is Role Playing?” sections claim otherwise. There are a enough similarities that a lot of people can make the jump, but there are also enough differences that not everyone can figure out how to make their character and that character’s story a real part of the game. How many players have you seen show up to a game with pages and pages of character background that never comes into play during the game? Or worse, extensively detailed characters that they try to shoehorn into a game they don’t fit into well at all?

To tell a story with a character, you need three things. The first is a character that the audience (in this case, the other players) can identify with in some way. This is the kind of “don’t just make a dead-eyed murderhobo” stuff that lots of game books (and thousands of gaming articles and blogs) have covered endlessly, so there’s no need to waste ink on it here. The second is the sense that the character fits into the group: giving the character a reason to be there, the group a reason to keep him around, and building relationships between the characters. This often happens naturally, and can be improved by making sure everyone knows the premise of the game and building connections between PCs from the start, either by working out more than just who has to be the cleric during character creation or by using something like Dungeon World’s Bonds mechanic. Most groups have not problem with players talking about the game before it starts, it’s talking about the game after the characters have left the tavern that some people have a problem with.

For some games, that’s all you need. A mission (the story provided by the GM, whether in the form of individual adventures or an over-arching plotline), some characterization, and a sense of group unity were the key ingredients for most TV shows and movies until around the turn of the century. The thing that’s missing is the character’s story. Without character-driven subplots, the character doesn’t really have a life of his own. The character only exists within the context of the group and the story that the GM has set up (and sometime he’s only involved in that story because he happens to be a PC). Especially in today’s world of seasonal (as opposed to episodic) television and cinematic universes where every major character has their own story that weaves in and out of the main plotline, more and more gamers want their characters to have arcs and subplots as well, and that’s the thing that most RPG books don’t really explain how to pull off (the lacuna, for those of you who have been wondering when I’d get to the point for the last five paragraphs).

Most game books give the GM all kinds of information about telling the main story. Many also give the players good information for providing set-up for the character’s story (those pages and pages of background that never become relevant), but very few touch on how to make the background stuff an actual part of the game. Since story is traditionally the GM’s territory, the few games that talk about character-driven subplots put the pressure on the GM, assuming that it’s her job to bring all the stuff from the character background into the game. I think this is unfair to the GM (she already has enough to do) and to the player (who shouldn’t be completely dependent on the GM to tell his character’s story). It also ignores the reality of how most games work. In my experience, the players with fully-realized characters were the players who actively worked to tell their character’s story by playing character goals and introducing supporting characters, character-driven subplots, and other character-centric stuff in a way that naturally fit into the larger game (just forcing your way onto center stage just annoys everyone). They also worked with the GM to make sure the player’s story got told.

The “working with the GM” part seems to be where most games drop the ball, in part because most game designers seem to be writing for an extreme (and mostly straw man) audience. For games aimed at the “let the dice fall where they may” crowd, who are nothing but power-gaming munchkins, any out-of-character discussion about the game is meta-gaming*, which is inherently evil, so talking about it would alienate the audience. On the other end of the spectrum are games aimed at the “drama club” crowd, where it’s taken for granted that every character is a special snowflake and the GM is not allowed to cause them any “agency”-destroying inconvenience without a drawn-out negotiation where everyone talks about their feelings. These games either talk about character subplots in vague terms or just assume that anyone playing them already knows what they’re doing.

Most games ignore the vast majority of gamers who fall in the middle and want character-driven stories and surprises, but don’t really grasp how to accomplish it. That’s unfortunate, because RPG players are both audience and authors, so their connection to the story doesn’t fit the author/reader relationship, or even the co-author/co-author relationship. A lot of people, even game designers, have trouble grasping that. My third criticism of first-time adventure writers (after passive verbs and misplaced modifiers) is almost always that they’re trying to tell the GM a story rather than give the GM the tools to tell the story. If the stable boy is a vampire, the adventure writer needs to tell the GM about that when the stable boy is introduced, not when players are supposed to figure it out. On the player/GM side of things, if you want your character to settle his score with Jabba, you need to let the GM know that your character wants his debt to Jabba to be a subplot sometime during the game, and probably give her some background about Jabba and his resources. She’s got this whole “civil galactic civil war” plotline to deal with, so she’s not going to have a lot of time to fully detail the Hutt crime syndicate. At the same time though, you don’t get to stage manage your character’s encounter with Jabba or decide how it turns out. That takes away the uncertainty that makes the story fun. If you get some bad rolls and end up getting frozen in carbonite, you and the rest of the party have to deal with the consequences. It’s the risk you take when you decide you want your character to have his own story.

Giving players the tools to work with the GM to tell their characters’ stories requires accepting the idea that not all meta-gaming is bad (just like most spoilers don’t actually make a movie less fun to watch), recognizing that playing an RPG isn’t the same as either creating or consuming fiction, figuring out what division of authorship between players and GM allows the players to enjoy the story both as a co-creators and as audience members, and providing advice about how to talk about it so players can figure out what works for their group. On the most basic level, this missing section is something like “How to Compromise,” but it’s a little more complicated than that and requires breaking down some long-standing gamer fallacies about how fiction, gaming, and adult social interaction work. Some of this involves theory and process that’s kind of hard to pin down, some of it involves basic interpersonal communication stuff that’s obvious to most people and potentially deeply upsetting to the people who need it most. I think I’m starting to see why most game designers just skip it.

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*While talking about the game does meet the dictionary definition of meta-gaming (if it were in the dictionary, at least), when I first encountered the word (probably in the early 90s, when people added “meta” to everything), it specifically referred to using player knowledge to give the character an unfair advantage. I’m not sure where or when the usage drifted to include any and all out-of-character discussion of the game, but I’ve run into it online and with a few flesh-and-blood gamers. Depending on which definition you’re going with, meta-gaming is either absolutely essential (actually talking about the game) or cheating (reading the module), but the negative connotation of the most obvious term for the kind of thing I’m talking about is kind of annoying.

Sunday, September 25, 2016

These are not by me, they are by two anonymous contestants, vote for which you like better.

The theme for this round is to describe the significance of something that's missing from an RPG text.Here is the first essay, if you like it best, send an email to zakzsmith AT hawtmayle with the subject line "LIH" and nothing else.

You were born without papers, in the shadow of a government or corporate enclave, never allowed to enter. Maybe your parents were anarchists, criminals, or just too poor and powerless for anyone to give a damn about. You lived in a slum (where else?), in the refuse of the elite. Disease, violence, squalor, pollution, and despair killed or mutilated so many of your peers, no matter whether they were monsters or saints or hustlers. If you’re honest with yourself, you realize that you weren’t any different, just luckier, and, perhaps, more of a monster than most. What is the line between courageous and psychotic? Whatever that line is, you walk it. You are willing to risk your body, your mind, your soul, and those of others, in pursuit of an exit. You run, but the shadows always follow you. This is the escapist game we play, a game with no escape for its PCs.

The door begins to shut at character creation. The only way to acquire papers is to take the flaw “Sinner,” a reference to the SIN (System Identification Number), which marks someone as a citizen of state or corporation. The various versions of this flaw all force the shadowrunner to pay taxes and make runner easier to identify, especially in the aftermath of a run. The criminal version of it puts the runner at the mercy of the justice system (the runner is basically paroled), and the corporate version makes the runner a failed corporate stooge or a low-level lackey, with little or no actual power in the corporation but hated, to the point of being targeted for death, by many of the SIN-less, the people the runner has to deal with every day in order to accomplish runs. Worst of all, a runner with SIN tends to be cautious and boring since if the runner is caught, off to prison the runner goes, losing whatever small benefits they had, and exchanging their national or corporate SIN for a criminal SIN. SIN can be acquired during gameplay, but as a friend once explained to me, no sane corporation or state would give a SIN to a runner without first equipping said runner with a cortex bomb, or something similar.

Still, if a runner can’t have a real SIN, the runner still needs a fake one to do anything in society, even buy a soy taco. This is what most runners opt for. A fake SIN keeps a runner trapped since it can be detected during any transaction, depending on the security level of the device checking the SIN. A fast food restaurant will only give the SIN a cursory glance, but trying to get a lease for a fancy apartment will put the SIN and the runner under great scrutiny. And all of these transactions create a trail. Eventually, the runner’s luck runs out (or an angry decker simply hacks into the runner’s life and outs the runner’s fake SIN to the authorities), and the SIN evaporates, and the runner needs a new SIN and, essentially, a new public life.

You might think that having a lot of money would help, but that too is a trap. Money in Shadowrun comes in two forms: credsticks, which are like cash, tied to no one but much more portable and much more easily stolen, and money tied to a SIN, like in a bank account. Due to the dangers of a SIN being found out and the ease with which credsticks can be stolen, runners have to live like tax evaders--always spending their money on something or hiding their money under their mattress (see note 1). Most opt for weapons, cyberware, or magic items -- tools of the trade. This is good for runs, but it keeps the runner in the shadows.

Is there any physical escape? If PCs travel too far outside their neighborhood, their relationship with their contacts will suffer. Also, area knowledge is a powerful thing, and constantly moving makes area knowledge a weapon to be used against the footloose PCs. PCs from the neighborhood, however, can make use of area knowledge. Finally, the PCs’ reputation and criminal record will eventually travel with them too, and sooner rather than later in a world with better-than-modern electronic communication as well as magical communication.

What about other worlds? There is a small box in the core rulebook (fifth edition) that admits to the possibility of mages and shamans visiting other planes of existence, but the only support for that kind of play is Aetherology, a short supplement (39 pages) with some evocative details but short of the specific details that many gamers expect, and that Shadowrun delivers for its core setting. A GM would have to design almost everything about the metaplanes himself or herself (or liberally steal from other sources such as D&D’s Planescape). What about outer space? The world is too broke for that, mostly, and it is a hostile place to mages and shamans, and there is little support, and what support it does have (in Target: Wastelands) makes it clear that magic won’t work in outer space. Nor should you expect some kind of people’s revolution. The corporations won, and they won big. Any one corporation might fall, but the system remains.

It is the system that even blocks social escape. Shadowrun actually has three such systems: Street Cred, Notoriety, and Public Awareness. These reflect its cyberpunk origins, since that genre is very concerned about reputation. In Shadowrun, a high Street Cred is a positive, but its only effect is to allow you to keep more of the successes that you roll on social skills where Street Cred would matter. Notoriety does not have a precise effect, and exists mostly to allow the GM to punish you for being obnoxious and to reduce your Street Cred. Public Awareness makes you better known, and at high levels, you might achieve the fame of outlaws like Bonnie and Clyde or Pablo Escobar. Their fame, ultimately, did not protect them, nor will it protect PCs. Instead it acts like a target painted on them.
What is left for the PCs to do but to act outside the law? For the most part, their very existence is illegal, and becoming legal is difficult to impossible, so the PCs might as well murder and steal, but Shadowrun points out that there are different ways to be an outlaw. In this world that is a maze with no exit, PCs can still choose what to do and why they do it, and yet, morality matters less, grand things matter less, and personal choices, impulses, loyalties, and the details of the world matter more. If you choose the evil corps as your target (and they make a great target with their wealth, arrogance, and 100% dedication to evil), criminal acts against it are mitigated and downgraded to the courageous mischief we see in caper films or even upgraded to the doomed heroism of samurai and gunslingers (a great ending for a campaign). But until that glorious end, your PC is still a criminal. The runners steal and murder, but they also save the day. Shadowrun’s seemingly shoddy construction allows for PCs who can be dastardly and heroic and have a grand time doing so, and, indeed, who have little choice but to both be part of the world and be gleeful, semi-heroic bastards.

Is it possible to play such characters in other games? Of course it is. There have been semi-heroic bastard PCs since the early days of roleplaying, and some adventuring parties in D&D, Rifts, and other games seem to consist of nothing but such PCs. They are a lot of fun to play. But there are other PCs too. Some PCs are unwilling to take a risk. Others are virtuous or villainous to a fault. Others don’t care about the consequences of their actions. Others are so powerful or competent that they make other PCs unnecessary. Others are depressed and angst-ridden (see Vampire) or very serious about their honor (see Legends of the Five Rings).

But by removing the escapes from the shadows, the Shadowrun rules and setting direct the GM and players to create a specific game experience that encourages PCs to be semi-heroic bastards by discouraging overly “good” or “evil” behavior since both can make runs more difficult, by encouraging players to build PCs who are specialized (basically, encouraging PCs to choose a class) and who thus will also have weaknesses so they must rely on their teammates, encouraging risk-taking, since doing nothing leads very quickly to poverty, and by keeping PCs focused on a narrow geographical area, players have an easier time becoming immersed in the setting. Again, it is possible to do all of this with other game systems, but this is the Shadowrun default.

By limiting or eliminating certain choices that are common to other games and settings, Shadowrun creates a distinct yet common gaming experience for its many players. D&D players can talk about the wonders of Planescape or the silliness of Castle Greyhawk or the survival-horror of Dark Sun or the dungeon they sacked. Vampire players can talk about their super-heroes with fangs or their cunning political schemes lasting centuries or their Near Dark style epic road trip across America. Rifts players can talk about their human-animal hybrid characters, or their power-armor characters, or fighting for or against the Coalition or traveling to completely different dimensions. But in my experience, when I talk with others who have played Shadowrun, the topic is always the same: The run.

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Notes
If Shadowrun had a dark satirical streak (ala Ray Winninger’s Underground), the most popular cybernetic enhancement would be a pouch in your body where you could easily hide and retrieve your credsticks: “Wait, wait, I gotta pull it out...there it is.”

Here is the first essay, if you like it best, send an email to zakzsmith AT hawtmayle with the subject line "SIR" and nothing else.

So, for this round of the contest we are to find something that our topic avoided, that the author is not aware it avoided, that the readers at large are not yet aware was avoided, and find interesting things that omission can tell us. I've decided to take a look at Combat in gaming.

Love and Gore: the Sanitized Combat Experience

Roleplaying games across the spectrum are a form of reality emulator. The open ended nature of actions in an RPG is one of the great features which let them mimic lived experience in a more dynamic way than other entertainments. It even exaggerates the options for action beyond what is possible, into the realm of what is imaginable, so as to make the life inside the game way more fun than the real world.

Pretend fighting is one of those play activities inherent to mammals. We find it fun so we have made Combat one of the mainstays of the RPG experience. The emulators we use to make the reality of the game world are missing something essential to the experience of real fighting: trauma.

When you stab that goblin in the balls it isn't a traumatic experience, it's comedy. You don't hear his agonized screams ringing in your ears for the rest of living memory, his blood doesn't run over your hand staining it in your mind despite your compulsive attempts to wash them over and over for years thereafter. If combat in the game even remotely resembled the real thing, it would not make for an enjoyable pastime. It would be an emotionally tolling horror genre miserycrawl.

Even further removed from the combat in roleplaying games are the battles in tabletop wargames. The roots of roleplaying games were seeded here, and if you think about what wargames are it's kind of fucked up. It takes a deeply disturbing and psychologically scarring event: War, and turns it into a form of play where you push pieces around harmlessly on a map. Even the idea of lining up your battalion of pieces that represent lines of soldiers, to knock other pieces over to mark them as dead, is a little bit cracked. The concept of "Soldier" is a cultural construct which serves to reduce the humanity of an individual so they are a killable thing. Objectifying a living, feeling being crescendos to a disturbing logical conclusion when you represent a person who is dying as an abstract game piece on a board.

The wargame origins of the RPG genre might have biased the design process in the early game. It could be the reason that fighting is so prevalent in most paper and dice games, as opposed to other parts of the human experience. There are examples of another way to build an RPG experience. In the King's Quest series of video games your obstacles are seldom combative in nature. Exploration, collection, and puzzle solving play a much larger part of the experience than combat. Character relationships, dialogue, and even romance occupy a larger portions of those adventures.

A cursory look at the design choices made in 4th Edition D&D will show you what the end result of the wargame bias can look like. Combat is everything, the interesting powers all help you fight in some form or fashion. The rate you use and regain your powers is largely measured by how often you rest between fights. The rest of the varied experiences of life are condensed into a meager handful of skill checks. The traumatic and visceral experience of fighting is codified into initiative turns, measured movement rates, and tidy dice rolls. It quantifies something terrible and divides it out into safely experienced and knowable parts, so we can use it as a form of play that dominates the narrative.

If the play fighting in our RPGs more closely emulated violence in reality, combat would be the less attractive option for obstacle resolution. We can also deconstruct the methods used to create tabletop combat and apply those systems to the other parts of the human experience in an effort to redress the imbalance. We might break the experience of romance down into its constituent actions. Initiative rolls could be made for dilated pupils and raised hairs on an arm. Stun saves could counteract the emotional paralysis between first base and second. Encounter powers would activate when we engaged in a social bluff instead of a battle. Carousing would get a d100 table.

I think that altering the balance between trauma and play in our game combat might be a useful tool for shaping a game's design, and in turn how we shape the imaginary lives lived at the table.
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Here is the first essay, if you like it best, send an email to zakzsmith AT hawtmayle with the subject line YEK and nothing else. It's about D&D-influencing author Jack Vance:

Jack Vance’s Dying Earth is basically a monoculture. Everywhere you go you get the same wildlife, the same wizards, the same measurements and money, the same aloof princesses and sociopathic adventurers, the same religious pedants and small-time conmen, the same backward villagers with stupid and dangerous traditions, the same card games, the same petty lords, the same conversations in the same bars. Even when someone goes a million years back in time there’s no sense that anything they see would be out of place on the earth they came from. Unlike Lyonesse, or every other fantasy epic, the Dying Earth doesn’t come with a map. It only has physical geography insofar as this is necessary to structure people’s adventures, and the same is true for cultural geography. It’s important for us to know that, in order to get the Silver Desert, Cugel has to cross the Mountains of Magnatz. And it’s important we know that in this little bullshit village they make you judge beauty contests and in that one they eat people’s fingers. But Vance is less interested in building up a coherent, inhabitable world than he is with leading us through a paratactic sequence of weird and memorable encounters. So it’s hard to lay down everything that happens on a chart in the same way that you can lay down everything that happens in Lyonesse, or its spiritual successor Game of Thrones. You can’t say that the guys who eat fingers are here and because of the placement of the river they would naturally come into conflict with the guys who regulate the sun. And these people all think the same way, anyway: they’re all literal, pedantic, hyper-rational and hateful small-minded pricks, like participants in the world’s worst internet argument. They all speak the same affected faux-courtly dialect and have the same basic approach to problem-solving. Even the monsters are like this. So what we lose is not a sense of place but rather a sense of distinction between places. It’s easy to visualise the Dying Earth, but it’s hard to think about how any one part of the Dying Earth is substantially different from any other part. Place-names abound, because Vance loves proper nouns, but wherever possible he avoids giving us a sense of context for them. He’s not interested in the relationships between them, or in fitting them into any kind of bigger picture, except insofar as it can be used to propel the story.

Here is a bit from Thomas Pynchon’s short story Entropy that explains what is going on here:

"Nevertheless," continued Callisto, "he found in entropy or the measure of disorganization for a closed system an adequate metaphor to apply to a certain phenomena in his own world… [he] envisioned a heat-death for his culture in which ideas, like heat-energy, would no longer be transferred, since each point in it would ultimately have the same quantity of energy; and intellectual motion would, accordingly, cease."

The Dying Earth is a closed thermodynamic system that has simmered down to equilibrium. Everything is the same because the world is ending and the energy it takes to differentiate things has run out.

This is also why it’s so hard for the characters in the Dying Earth to ever get anything done. It’s why The Eyes of The Overworld ends with Cugel returned to where he began, stranded on a frozen beach and condemned to repeat the exact same journey again in the sequel. It’s why the only people on the Dying Earth with anything resembling ambition are either wizards or eccentrics like Guyal of Sfere, all of whom ultimately aspire to escape the world on which they were born and on which the laws of physics themselves conspire against accomplishment. The beginning and end of a story are two distinct points, like two cities on a plain, and it takes energy to keep them separate. So Dying Earth stories inevitably tend to gravitate towards the picaresque, the kind of episodic narrative where nothing ever changes and the status quo is never seriously disturbed. A lot of people have written picaresques over the years and you’ll find many of them listed in Zak’s essay on the subject here, which I assume you have all read a bunch of times on account of how it’s foundational to the genre of games blogging. But what Vance does that, e.g., Jack Kerouac or the writers of superhero comics don’t do is make the story not just a picaresque but a commentary on the nature of picaresques, and write characters that are struggling against the limitations of the picaresque form. Pynchon is his buddy here. Entropy in Pynchon is an active force of destruction, waging tireless war against his characters’ motivations and memories, eroding their sense of self and making it impossible for them to remember what they’re supposed to be doing. Vance shows us a world in which this kind of entropy has almost totally won. The future does not exist, all human potential has been dramatically curtailed and the only remaining options are to flee to the stars or become a wandering hate machine like Cugel, with no real emotional register and no ability to care about anything beyond immediate survival.

This is not as obvious a choice as it might seem. Cugel is the archetypal murderhobo, and not having to worry about the future is the whole point of the murderhobo. We don’t necessarily want to see ourselves as the heroes of some grand narrative. We’re just as likely to see ourselves as people who have a few adventures and then get eaten by a grue. It’s funnier and there’s less pressure. Vance maintains the same kind of ironic distance from Cugel, never quite endorsing him but never quite condemning him, as we often do with the characters in our own games. On the one hand, he says, it would be depressing to actually be this guy. On the other hand, at least you wouldn’t have to go to work in the morning. And even the idea of the sun going out holds its own macabre charm. The Pynchon story ends with his heroes shattering the barrier between them and the rest of the world in order to embrace thermodynamic equilibrium, “a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion”. The perverse appeal entropy holds for them, half alienating and half welcoming, is the same kind of appeal the Dying Earth holds for us.

Here is the second essay, if you like it best, send an email to zakzsmith AT hawtmayle with the subject line LUA and nothing else. It's not about D&D-influencing author Jack Vance:

D&D is anti-medieval

You can be forgiven for thinking that OD&D is a medieval European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as "Rules for Fantastic Medieval War Games" (on the cover) and "rules [for] designing your own fantastic-medieval campaign" (in the introduction). However, in the game itself, there's precious little to suggest feudalism, Europe, chivalry, a post-imperial dark age, or even the existence of a monarchy at all. Apart from the technology suggested by the weapon list, it could just as well be a simulation of the professional meritocracy of Byzantium, or the city-state sovereignty of Barsoomian Mars. (There's more explicit textual support in OD&D for Mars than there is for fantasy medieval Europe.) But neither of these strike the mark. OD&D's cultural details suggest a society original to Gygax - nonsensical as a medieval fantasy, but coherent and striking as an American fantasy of empowerment and upward mobility. It's an armor-clad repudiation of medieval feudalism, like Twain's Connecticut Yankee.

It's not feudal

The way you advance in a feudal society is to win glory in battle for your overlord. Then he grants you land, which is the main form of wealth. Unless you're a peasant. Then you can never advance at all.

That's not at all what happens in D&D. There is no overlord to grant you land. Land, instead of being a form of wealth, is completely free! ("At any time a player/character wishes he may select a portion of land (or a city lot) upon which to build his castle, tower, or whatever. The following illustrations are noted with the appropriate cost in Gold Pieces.") The cost of building a structure is merely the a la carte cost of all its architectural elements. It costs nothing at all to acquire the land to build on, even inside a city.

Wealth in D&D is primarily in the form of coinage and jewels, not land and cattle, making the D&D economy more modern than medieval. Some have suggested that D&D takes place in a time of exploration and renaissance when coinage, and the middle class, is eclipsing the power of the nobility. I'll go further. There is no sign that there is any nobility to eclipse, even a waning one.

If you build a castle in the "wilderness", you have to clear the area of monsters for 20 miles around. You then gain control of a handful of villages within this area. You don't have to compete against any other ruler or pay taxes to any overlord for these villages! This omission seems significant, since Gygax will always gleefully mention any relevant obstacle if it exists.

The people who live in villages are called either "villagers" or "inhabitants", not "peasants," "commoners" or "serfs." They pay you taxes. If you piss off the villagers, the DM is encouraged to annoy you with "angry villagers", "city watch", "militia", or "a Conan type." Notable in its absence is any local form of knighthood, gentry, nobility, or ruling class to oppose you.

There are no knights

The word knight doesn't even appear in OD&D. But there is one group of people who act distinctly knight-like. The wilderness contains castles, ruled by fighters, magic-users, or clerics. The fighters will challenge players to a joust (using Chainmail rules), taking the loser's armor and offering hospitality to the winner. This has a sort of Arthurian chivalry to it, but Pendragon it is not. Gygax carefully avoids calling these folks "knights." They're fighting-men, with retainers (monstrous and human) and armies, looking very like the ones players can acquire. Furthermore, castle-owning fighting men are just as rare as castle-owning magic-users and clerics. The Outdoor Survival game board, which forms the default OD&D map, has a land area of 25,000 miles, half the size of England. There are about six castle-owning fighting-men in that area. In other words, castles of the wilderness aren't dominated by an analogue of a knightly order, leavened by a few fantastic spellcasters. It looks, rather, as if they were built by a small handful of adventurers, appearing in roughly the class proportions of a typical adventuring party. (Fighters are, if anything, under-represented.)

There are no vassals

Let's talk about how you gain followers. Gary says, "It is likely that players will be desirous of acquiring a regular entourage of various character types, monsters, and an army of some form." In a truly medieval game, there's a model for that: people swear themselves to your service in exchange for your protection. You raise an army by requiring service from peasants who live on your land. In other words, you gain vassals. D&D ignores this model, replacing it with one in which you pay retainers and specialists by the month. Loyalty is bought with a mixture of cash and charisma. You can hire armies, too, from Light Foot to Heavy Horsemen. (No knights.)

There are no kings

There's no evidence of a monarchy. You never have to declare fealty to anyone. While you can create a barony, there is no way to level up and become a duke or King. There are no rules for controlling territory more than a day's ride from your castle. In the hostile emptiness of OD&D's wilderness, power doesn't travel well.

The only mention of kings in the little brown books is in the descriptions of humanoid monsters, e.g. in a goblin lair "the 'goblin king'" will be found. (Gygax quotes the term "goblin king".) It seems unlikely that the term implies a crown, a system of divine right, inheritance laws, etc. Since a goblin king leads a single lair of 40-400 goblins, he's probably just the local boss, just like the less evocatively named "leader/protector type" who rules every 30-300 orcs.

There is no lost empire

There certainly seems to be a power vacuum in the world of OD&D, ready for the player/characters to exploit. What used to fill that vacuum?

There's no evidence for (or against) the idea that OD&D takes place in a dark age after a fallen Roman Empire analogue or during the death throes of a feudal kingdom. Sure, someone built those "huge ruined piles" under which lie the dungeons. But based on the treasures to be found there, the dungeon builders were part of a coinage economy just like the current one. There hasn't even been significant inflation or deflation since the dungeons were built. The richest dungeon treasure hoard, on level 13 and deeper, averages out to about 10,000 GP in coin. That's as much as a baron can earn from a year's worth of taxes: not an insignificant sum to sock away in a dungeon, but not kingly or imperial either. This doesn't suggest that dungeons are relics of a far richer past. It seems rather that things used to be like they are right now.

There are few European details

The monster descriptions of "men", "elves", and "dwarves" don't suggest that the game is set in a European culture. The types of "men" are Bandits, Berserkers, Brigands, Dervishes, Nomads, Buccaneers, Pirates, Cave Men, and (perhaps) Mermen. Berserkers are a little Nordic in flavor, but are balanced out by Dervishes and Nomads from the "desert or steppes".

The government suggested by the player's "barony" is almost completely a-cultural. A player builds a stronghold, and then they can extort money from the surrounding people. This is the structure of every non-nomadic human society. The only European element is the technology level of your stronghold: it has merlons, barbicans, etc.

The D&D weapon list has a medieval feel to it, but partly that's just because that's what we're expecting to find. In fact, it's a sort of survey of (mostly) pre-gunpowder weapons. Most of the weapons and armor appear in ancient Europe and in Asia as well as in medieval Europe. Partial exceptions: Composite bows are mostly non-European, while longbows are associated with Europe. The halberd is basically a Renaissance weapon, and the two-handed sword appears in medieval Europe, India, and Japan, but not the ancient world. No one knows what "plate mail" is supposed to be.

If not medieval, what?

All over, the D&D rules seem to be explicitly eschewing a medieval, feudal model in favor of a cash-based economy, a nonexistent or powerless government, and a social-classless society in a sparsely inhabited, unforgiving world.

If the OD&D rules suggest any government at all, it is a meritocracy, or more precisely, a levelocracy. Creatures with more XP and hit dice rule lower-level ones, from settled barons and goblin kings to wandering bandits and nomads. This is not only non-medieval, it is anti-feudalistic and anti-aristocratic. Level requirements for baronies are at odds with the hereditary gloss added to D&D in nearly every subsequent setting.

OD&D also exhibits an obsession with money-gathering for its own sake that is suggestive of mercantilism or capitalism.

D&D is not "fantastic-medieval." It's not even "fantastic renaissance" or "fantastic-post-apocalyptic." It's "fantastic American history."

How did Gygax set out to write a fantastic-medieval game and end up writing an American one?

OD&D is meant to be setting-free. The game's referee is to create his or her own campaign, ranging in milieu from the "prehistoric to the imagined future" (with emphasis on the medieval, especially for beginners). In the later 1e Dungeon Masters Guide, Gygax further explains, "There are dozens of possible government forms, each of which will have varying social classes, ranks, or castes. Which sort you choose for your milieu is strictly your own prerogative. While this game is loosely based on Feudal European technology, history and myth, it also contains elements from the Ancient Period, parts of more modern myth, and the mythos of many authors as well. Within its boundaries all sorts of societies and cultures can exist, and there is nothing to dictate that their needs be Feudal European."

But it is very difficult to write a document with no cultural assumptions at all. Gygax consciously excluded the trappings of a medieval society, and filled that vacuum with "real life" American details. Gygax wrote D&D in a country where, 100 years before, frontier land was considered free for the taking. (19th century propaganda depicted the land's original Native American inhabitants as inimical savages, like orcs). At the same period, the success of America's industrialist "robber barons" taught the country that birth and family weren't the keys to American power; the American keys were self-reliance, ability, and the ruthless accumulation of money.

While it's possible that D&D's modern details slipped into the game unobserved,

Gygax may have been quite aware of his game's implicit setting. After all, his original pre-publication Greyhawk campaign drew heavily from his own American experience. It took place on a United States map with Greyhawk at Chicago, and Dyvers at Milwaukee. His buddy Don Kaye's Greyhawk character, Murlynd, was a gunslinger from Boot Hill. I think it's quite likely that Gygax intentionally gave his game a New World spin.

Intentional or not, OD&D represents a milestone in American fantasy - and maybe the last un-muddled example of the genre it inspired. Most of D&D's thousands of imitators, in game and fiction, preserve the game's democratic bones (cash economy, guns for hire, rags to riches stories) while overlaying a medieval-European skin. The combination is not fortunate. Gygaxian levelocracy, where a villager can rise to become a baron or a "Conan type", is fundamentally incompatible with the European fantasy typified by Lord of the Rings, in which no fellowship can alter the fact that Sam is by birth a servant, Frodo a gentleman, Strider a king, and Gandalf a wizard.

OD&D's American strain of fantasy didn't even last within TSR. In 1980, Gygax himself reworked the World of Greyhawk into what looks, from its cover, like a supplement about Arthurian Knights:

But it's worth taking a step back from the medieval-fantasy cliches that overran later D&D publications, and playing the original, more coherent setting: A swords-and-sorcery world, empty of government, where anyone can pick up a sword, become a hero, and live the American dream.

They were defeated when attempting to prevent a bank robbery by the gang of mutant terrorists known as The Electric Gang but rescued by members of The Frightful, who battled the rebels to a standstill.

(The target numbers are if you're playing where you just roll 3d20 instead of using the Marvel Superheroes chart. 1 success=Green, 2=Yellow, 3=Red.)

DIE EISEN HEXE (the Iron Witch)

F Ty (6) --(target: 17)

A Gd (10)--16

S Pr (4)--18

E Ex (20)--15

R Rm(30)--14

I Am (50)--12

P In(40)--13

Health 40

Karma 120

POWERS

Sorcery--Amazing. Mostly transmutation and curses. There's always a way to break the curse, she'll brag about it.

TALENTS

Occult

THE TWISTED MAN

F Ex (20)--15

A Am(50)--12

S Rm(30)--14

E In(40)--13

R Ty (6)--17

I Gd (10)--16

P Fe (2)--19

Health 140

Karma 18

POWERS

Twisting space--you can't escape from him or where he is without an In (40) Reason FEAT and an Ex (20) Agility Feat. He can drop people into these spaces if they're grappled. Anything that distorts his body distorts the space round him--make an Agility FEAT to avoid it.

Thursday, September 22, 2016

So Eclipse Phase has this cool transhuman idea that you switch bodies ("re-sleeving"), unfortunately almost everything else about it sucks--the system, the art, the graphic design--so me and Kirin invented a new more Old School game of transhuman post-scarcity hard sci-fi star horror that we're gonna play on Thursdays. It's based on Gigacrawler.

GIGACRAWLER:BRAIN DAMAGE PHASE*

an old school game of transhuman post-scarcity hard sci-fi star horror

copyright Zak and Kirin today but you can play it

Character generation: Brain

First you'll want a brain, here are your choices:

Human brain, starting sanity points: 20

AI, starting sanity: 22

Psionic human, starting sanity: 17

Uplifted Animal brain, starting sanity: 18
You can obviously invent more kinds of brains like alien species and stuff but we're starting with these.

In addition to sanity points, your brain has some other stats. These 3 are familiar and self-explanatory:

Intelligence

Charisma

Perception

You get to rank one of these at +2, one of them at +1 and one of them at +0. Pick! If you have an AI brain you can rank Intelligence at +3 and the others at +0 if you want, if you have an Uplifted Animal brain you can rank Perception at +3 and the others at +0 if you want.

You also get some traits which describe both your personality and your resistance to losing sanity for different reasons. These are paired:

Biostubborn vs bioflexible-- Biostubborn means you're very comfortable in your body. Getting hurt doesn't freak you out but switching bodies does. Bioflexible means you're totally a cool anarchist about sprouting extra limbs and shit but you have a hard time handling damage to your body.

Biostubborn and Bioflexible are each rated on a scale of +0 through +10 and together must add up to +10. So you can have each at +5 or have +3 Biostubborn, +7 Bioflexible, or +10 Biostubborn, +0 Bioflexible, etc.

Psychostubborn vs Psychoflexible-- Psychostubborn means you're clear in your sense of self. It's hard for you to go insane from having your (biological or electronic) brain messed with but it's also hard for you to adapt to new information. Psychoflexible means it's easy to download new information but your sense of self is weak, so you have a hard time handling intrusion into your mind.

Psychostubborn and Psychoflexible are each rated on a scale of +0 through +10 and together must add up to +10. So you can have each at +5 or have +3 Psychostubborn, +7 Psychoflexible, or +10 Psychostubborn, +0 Psychoflexible, etc.**

You also get 4 points to spend on the last two things: Knowledges and your Familiar. If you are psionic you can use them on psionic abilities instead.

Knowledges are packages of information skills you can buy to start with for your brain. These start out broad and are technical things (ie only cover things that not all people can try, like there's no swimming or dodging skill because anyone can try to swim or dodge). Each Knowledge costs one point, they are:

You also have a Familiar (like what is called in E Phase, a Muse) which is a personal AI that hangs out with you, it is full of software designed to help you not be murdered. It has two stats:

Knowledgebank--This is how big and well-designed the AI's program of downloadable skills and information is. The better this trait, the better the chance your AI can get you information and abilities compatible with your neural net. Downloading knowledge isn't instantaneous and requires a mental flexibility check or results in lost sanity (see rules below for details).

Printer--This is how good at creating and locating useful equipment out of local materials your familiar is when it's hooked up to the proper equipment. If you need a shotgun or a grappling hook or something and haven't already explicitly collected one, you roll on this trait to see if your 3d printer has prepared one for you. Downloading knowledge isn't instantaneous (see rules below for details).***

The bank and printer are rated +0, +1, or +2--your choice, but come out of the same pool from which you buy starting Knowledge. So you can choose to have +2 in Knowledgebank and +2 in Printer but have 0 Knowledges to start or you can have, say, Medicine and Piloting and +0 in Knowledgebank and +2 to Printer.

If you choose a body that does not match your brain, you get 5 additional points to add to this pool because you're presumably experienced and on at least your second body.

Speaking of choosing bodies....

Character generation: Body

You choose a body from a GM-provided list of available bodies. Different planets have different bodies available at different moments.

Each body has some familiar stats again, they usually start out rated +0, +1, or +2:

Strength
Attack (covers shooting and close combat)
Dexterity
Armor

Armor is almost always +2. With humans and most other organics this represents some removable armor, with robots this is something built in.

There is another stat called Defense which is just Dex+Armor.

Each body also has saving throws, based on what it's made of, ranked +0 thru +10, these are:

Each body also has special abilities called Advances.
-The first time you move into a new body you get to choose one advance.
-Each time you finish a mission or otherwise "get XP" you get to buy one advance from your body's list. (Also see "Leveling up" below).
-If you start the game with a brain and body that match, you get all the Advances for that body--it's your body.****

Advances are typically either things that offer a situational +2 to ability rolls (like you are extra good with knives: +2 to knife combat or piloting in-atmosphere craft: +2 to Dex rolls doing that), a +1 to an ability, or powers/aptitudes that allow you to do things nobody without the aptitude can do (like climb walls like a fly).

Some Advances are Permanent--that is, they stay with you even after you switch bodies.

Advances:
+1 to Dex (Permanent)
+2 to Dex in stealth situations (non-Permanent)
+1 to Attack, Defense and Dex in zero-G (Permanent)
+1 more to Attack, Defense and Dex in zero-G (non-permanent)
+2 to Mechanics and engineering if used for sabotage (Permanent)

Observation droid

Strength +0
Attack +0
Dexterity +2
Armor +1
Defense +3

Exposure save +8
Corrosive save +6
Electromagnetic save +2

Advances:
+1 to Per (Permanent)
+2 to Dex rolls for stealth
+1 to Dex rolls for stealth (Permanent)
+3 to Bioflexible (Permanent) (results in a -3 to Biostubborn)

Advances:
+4 to Dex in stealth situations due to changing skin color
+2 to Dex for climbing
+1 to Dex (Permanent)
Chameleoid dermographic language (Understanding is permanent, but being able to "speak" the language requires a body with an appropriate skin)
Pilot Chameleonoid vessel (Permanent)--Chameleonoid vessels have a unique color-coded control system layout. This is essential a specialist Knowledge.

In our games, the GM will make some more bodies available depending on the mission, but if you want to play right now, feel free to make your own. Remember if you start with a brain native to your body you get all the advances, so don't give any one body too many. Though some bodies are just better than others, period.

Task Resolution

Generally you roll a d12+modifiers to do anything where failing might have interesting consequences.

Most rolls are opposed, like you roll d12+Int to hack something and the GM rolls d12+however good they think the countermeasures are to resist you. High roll wins. However, the GM can also assign a static target number in situations where the thing isn't fighting back, depending how hard it is. If a character has some issue that makes things especially hard or easy for it specifically (ie swimming this lake of goo is normally a difficulty of 8 but it's especially hard if you're a dog) then the GM may use 5e-D&D style "advamtage" or "disadvantage".

Use of Knowledges and most Psi powers are an ability check that is simply enabled by having the Knowledge. So a "Chemistry check" is an Int check that you get to make because you have Chemistry. It's possible to have a Knowledge enable more than one kind of ability score check: a GM could rule that diagnosing a disease is a Int check (enabled by Medicine) but performing surgery is Dex (enabled by Medicine).

Again: Knowledges are specialist things--you can't even try piloting most craft if you don't have the pilot Knowledge.

Urgent Task Resolution and Combat

Since this is horror, combat in this game more follows the Call of Cthulhu "figure out something big before you die" model than the "ranges and damage spreads matter a lot" model of like D&D and wargames. In any situation where you need to do this before someone else does that (usually combat) there is no initiative, rather there's a "clash" system.

Think of a clash like a panel in a comic book. Each clash involves opposed rolls. It takes about 6 seconds.

Basically everyone says what they want to do. Then they roll a d12, high roll gets to do what they want. In complex combats with multiple participants, if you don't roll high but your task wouldn't be interrupted by anyone rolling higher than you, you can do it, you do your thing.

Typical combat involves an attack (Attack score + d12) vs either another attack (Attack vs d12) or dodging, running away, etc (Defense + d12). You could also have like an attack (Attack score + d12) vs an attempt the hack the weapon making the attack (Int + d12, only possible if the combatant has Hacking).

There's no variable damage--this is a harsh post-scarcity future and if you are using a weapon strong enough to get through the enemy's armor (or lack thereof) the enemy is gonna get fucked up. If you aren't, nothing happens.

You go straight to the crit table at the bottom of this entry every time you get hit. (It's basically an adapted version of this.)

Example: If a regular person punches another person in (22nd century nanospace-)armor, nothing happens--they have crazy future armor and the armor is preposterously out of scale to the attack. If they punch a regular person in no armor successfully, that is doing damage and you roll a crit. Combat is fast and deadly.

If you roll less than a 50 on that table, you need to also make a Psychostubborn check (difficulty 10) to avoid losing d4 sanity points.

The winner of a clash gets to decide the range at the beginning of the next clash. So if you successfully shoot someone you can decide the next round starts with you far away (you are hit, I can make my getaway) or close up (you are hit! I can now come over and finish you off). The max distance you can move away is 60 feet unassisted.

If the goal of the combat action was not to do damage--like you wanted to knock someone down or take something or whatever--then, again, winner does that.

If the situation is such that one side would naturally have an advantage (you're fighting in a tiny broom closet and one person has a knife and the other has a sword, so the knife is a better weapon) then the GM can grant 5e-style Advantage (roll twice, pick the highest).

Note that because Defense involves adding Armor to Dex, maneuvers where armor wouldn't matter (grappling, pickpocketing) are just against Dex.

Area-effect weapons and environmental conditions can trigger body saving throws--failing one of these save does one of three things:

-Kills you
-Inflicts a specific kind of damage unique to that kind of effect (ie exposure to this radiation makes your eyes melt shut)
-Causes a roll on the Crit table

The GM is encouraged to design bizarre puzzle-monster postLovecraftian boss foes that require more than physical force to put them down.

Weapons and Equipment

This isn't a Spidergoat Economy, your Printer provides you with weapons capable of dealing with ordinary threats provided you make your Printer roll and they fit the tech level/aesthetic of the game (kinda hard science fi, except some people are psychic?). You need a grenade? Make a Printer roll to see if you managed to download specs from the Aether and get one properly made. You need a neutron grenade specifically, to kill the organics but leave the ship intact? The GM might make that a higher difficulty number check, maybe an 11.

This isn't always a check to see if you can print it--printing takes at least a number of minutes equal to the difficulty of the check times 2 in minutes. It's a check to see if you were prepared enough to have the thing already.

Downloading New Knowledges

This takes one minute and a successful Knowledgebank check, difficulty 8. A successful download requires the PC to make a difficulty 8 Psychoflexible check or lose d4 San, if it's a new language it's only difficulty 6.

Healing

This will mostly be dealt with on the crit chart, but mechanical repair or medicine can be used to fix crits but it takes time and can't be done in a tactical situation.

Dying

Dying happens if you take a bad crit. Then you get re-sleeved as your brain is emailed somewhere and downloaded into a new body in the nearest friendly cache. You have to make a Bioflexible check or you lose d6 Sanity in the process. The difficulty number depends on the new body:

Body matches brain: 6
Previously-experienced type of body: 8
First time humanoid, first time non-humanoid, first time organic: 10
First time machine: 12
First time machine and first time humanoid/non-humanoid simultaneously: 14
Other: 9

Losing more than 3 sanity on one roll or in one hour results in a temporary insanity from the table at the back of most editions of Call of Cthulhu. It lasts until things quiet down and someone either administers Psychotherapy (with a difficulty number = 20 minus current San score) or the victim makes a successful Craft/Hobby roll or you level up and choose the option to fix your sanity. This recovers d4 San and cures the condition.

You lose all your sanity points and you're permanently insane and an NPC.

Leveling up
Every time you've completed a mission (GM decides what that means) you can do one of three things:

-Take an Advance from your body's list of advances. You may only take each once, though some are listed in alternate forms, permanent and nonpermanent and/or with different numbers--you can take each form once.
-Gain d4 San
-Take a new Knowledge
-Take a specialty Knowledge (that is, any custom Knowledge narrower than you already have) at +1. So, like, if you already have Hacking. you could take Neural Net Hacking +1. And if you already have Neural Net hacking you could take Neural Net hacking of Military AIs at +1. These stack and apply to the rolls you make with them.

You don't have to roll a Psychoflexible check to gain these knowledges or specialties, they're learned the old fashioned way.

Max on anything in any situation is +10.

------

Crit table

Losing a body part your body used to have but don't now means instant death (so the more mutilated you become the more dangerous combat is). Losing a body party (or equivalent) your body never had means instant death if you're larger than human sized or you've evaded the crit if you're smaller and if you're human size, roll a dex check (8), failure means death, success means you've avoided damage.

1-Adrenaline surge, or auxiliary program activates, you are +1 to Comabt then collapse for d6 clashes when the fight ends plus awesome scar, +1 Cha.
2-Adrenaline surge or auxiliary program activates, you are +1 to Combat then collapse for d6 clashes when the fight ends.
3-Awesome scar, +1 Cha
4-Scar
5-Ugly scar -1 Cha
6 Lose a tooth, or equivalent
7 Lose some teeth or equivalent in an unbecoming place -1 Cha
8 Str check vs 10 or be knocked down, conscious

14 Lose right eye or equivalent
15 Lose left eye or equivalent
16 Lose right ear or equivalent
17 Lose left ear or equivalent
18 Lose tongue or equivalent

19 Lose d6 fingers on left hand (6= just thumb) or equivalent
20 Lose d6 fingers on right hand (6= just thumb) or equivalent
21 Embarassing injury (permanent) (player's choice)
22 Lose your nose or equivalent unless the player decides this makes the pc unplayable in which case be a softie and let them pick a facial feature.

22 Biostubborn check (10) or be stunned only able to defend) for 5 clashes (or until proper full-on medical care) then conscious.
23 Biostubborn check (10) or be stunned...
24 Biostubborn check (10) or be stunned...
25 Biostubborn check (10) or be stunned…
26 Biostubborn check (10) or be stunned...

68 lost use of right hand Biostubborn check vs 6 each clash to keep conscious until successful Medicine check vs 6 (-1 Dex when moving for missing appendage). d4 days to recover without proper full-on medical care but even then you're still maimed.
69 lost use of left hand Biostubborn check...
70 lost use of right foot Biostubborn check…
71 lost use of left foot. Biostubborn check...

72 lost use of left arm past elbow die in 30 minutes unless Medicine check (difficulty 8). Medicine check keeps you conscious with a Biostubborn check vs 8 each clash to keep conscious (-1 Dex for mangled limb). Week to recover without proper full-on medical care but even then you're maimed.
73 lost use of right arm past elbow die in 30 minutes unless...
74 lost use of right leg below knee die in 30 minutes unless…
75 lost use of left leg below knee die in 30 minutes unless…

76 lost use of right arm die in d4 minutes unless Medicine check (difficulty 8). Medicine check keeps you conscious with a Biostubborn check vs 8 each clash to keep conscious (-1 Dex for lost limb). Two weeks to recover without without proper full-on medical care but even then yr still missing a limb.
77 lost use of left arm die in d4 minutes unless...
78 lost use of right leg die in d4 minutes unless…
79 Lost use of left leg. Die in d4 minutes unless…

90-97 Internal injuries, unconscious. Die in d12 clashes unless Successful Medicine (difficulty 10) check this clash against and even then you're at disadvantage on everything physical. A month to recover without proper full-on medical care.

98 Instant death
00 Instant and demoralizing death. Allies roll Bioflexible vs 8 or be stunned for one clash.

Character sheet:

-----
* (Working title)**The ides of paired mental traits is stolen from Pendragon***This post-scarcity equipment solution stolen from the "Preparedness" skill in Night's Black Agents****The concept of bodies as things you serially buy advances from is derived from the Warhammer Fantasy career system. Which might itself be derived from Traveller?

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Spidergoat Economicsis a phrase Jeff Rients coined for something that has been around in games for ages: the idea that due to prevailing setting or personal conditions, your character must make do with gear that is not only suboptimal, but eccentrically so. This may be true for the whole game--and may determine in-game goals.

Spidergoat Economics isn't really just about gear--it's about how advancement and abilities are tied to developments in game (ie, finding "treasure" or looting dead enemies) rather than players designing and then getting to play the exact character with the exact katana they imagine in their head. It is not a player empowerment device-it is the other thing: It empowers either the GM or the dice to set up gear itself as a challenging starting condition with which the challenge-oriented player must contend. It is not escapist.

Most games do not give themselves over completely to Spidergoat Economics and are mostly a hybrid of the reliable and the Spidergoat.

Other examples:

In the old D&D systems where your spells are acquired randomly ("Chance to know each spell") and so you have to kill a boss monster with Mending, spells are Spidergoat. They are even more Spidergoat if they have horrible downsides or inconvenient durations, areas of effect, etc.

Originally (and in most OSR and DIY D&D games) magic items are distributed according to Spidergoat Economics. You can't just buy them, so you do what you can with your +2 Longsword of Volcanic Activity rather than just buying a +5 sword off the rack.

My D&D starting equipment list here is a very lite version of Spidergoat Economics--it's all normal equiment, but it isn't presumed that your character can just start session 1 with exactly what they want. In terms of armor and standard weapons, it ceases to be Spidergoat as soon as the players get to a big city.

On the other hand, my TMNT/Mutant Future Cannonball Run Post-Apoc Restaurant Reviewer game was 100% Spidergoat Economics as the character sheet shows.

Scrap Princess looked at my Shadowrun post from yesterday and provided one of the most divine examples of Spidergoat Economics yet--imagining a world of cyberpunk magic where nothing works the way you think it does because you're just a scrabbling schmuck between weird juggernauts.

"Hi-tech = reliable is a fucking techo-utopian scam . That gun with the target seeking bullets needs a wi-fi connection and the latest app download or it ain't doing shit. And if it gets knock around you sure ain't fixing it because it's planned obsolesces in the hyper markets of super capitalism chummer . Also see guns that you don't legally own but just pay a monthly licence fee for and it keeps trying to sell you micro-transactions."

...and gives lots of reasons the setting could and should be de-rationalized to explain how you ended up with such weird tech. Don't forget to read the comments!

Like all economic systems, Spidergoat Economics has implications that reach far beyond what you buy and how. It is related to randomness and to the rationing of options, and a game style devised around finding clever ways to play the hand you're dealt: Noisms recent post about how Shadowrunners could be victims of not just The New but The Weird New extends thoughts along the same tracks.

Spidergoat equipment systems are, ironically, very newbie-friendly as you never have to go "Here's a list of a jillion things, what do you want brand new person?" there are no trap options because everything is a trap. You don't buy stuff, you are assigned stuff and then decide who to target to get more stuff.

Counter-examples:

5e D&D as written--where you have enough to buy whatever armor you like and can get an "adventurer's pack" is not Spidergoat (thought the d100 chart of trinkets is kind a feint in that direction--and lovely, we at DIY D&D get what you were going for with that, whoever wrote it).

The assumption in 3.5 and 4e that you would just eventually buy magic items is very ungoat, cabron.

Post-scarcity futures are obviously not Spidergoat. (But post-post-scarcity is: this power armor was designed to work in a world of infinite solar energy but you crashed near a dying dwarf so you can use it for 3 rounds a day...)

Superhero character gen is mostly not Spidergoat as the challenge of making a coherent character out of collaged elements often results in PCs too silly to play in a genre where suspension-of-disbelief is already pretty high. These games need design and players need mostly to get what they want or it won't hold together as a character--though figuring out what parts of a hero pc you could goatify (personality flaws, npc support system, interparty relationships) is an interesting challenge. Maybe Wolverine spent so many points on badass he had nothing left over for Height or Working Well With Others.

Abstractness is fundamentally un-Spidergoat: the kinds of games or subsystems where you get a pool of points and spend them to create a thing of xxxx level effectiveness and you flavor it to taste (ie "You can call it whatever you want as long as it does 3d6 damage").

Apocalypse World is an interesting case: The setting elements describe a Spidergoat Economics scavenged and kit-bashed future but the system distributes these things in a way that sometimes allows for the players themselves to design them, which makes the character have to undergo Weird Scarcity, but the player gets, in practice, a gun that works like other guns. Usually. So like: the setting is pretty Spidergoat but the system is less so. The setting describes a scarcity the player does not have to tactically account for.

Spidergoat Economics is an easy way to make any sci-fi setting interesting, assuming you aren't attached to "I get to make the character I want to make with the stuff I want them to have" or abstraction or unfettered player-invention (though fettered player-invention is Spidergoat compatible: "it works but..."). Spidergoat is to setting what d100 is to plot. Like:

-Yes, you have the fastest ship in the galaxy but...your hyperdrive doesn't always work and it maybe isn't yours?

-RIFTS is solved instantly with Spidergoat Economics. Nice Glitter Boy armor there. Shame if the coolant tank got a leak... Reflex missiles huh? I think I saw one of those 3 years ago in a church full of mutant bats.

-Voyager is essentially Spidergoat Star Trek. Even the fucking crew is scavenged.